Professional sport in the European Union: Regulation and re-regulation

Book abstract:

As sport becomes increasingly commercialised with sports business accounting for around 3% of world economic activity, its regulation continues to be fragmentary and the difficulty of delineating issues of sport from issues of business remain. This book examines the interface between sport, business and policy and analyses how law regulates sport and sports business.

The opening chapters provide background to issues regulated at the European level such as broadcasting rights, the transfer system, drugs and doping, and economic regulation. There is also an interview with Jean-Louis Dupont, the Belgian lawyer who took on the Bosman case which is widely seen as the significant catalyst in the re-regulation of European sport.

The book is then divided into four parts. The first part seeks to provide an underpinning to the debate concerning re-regulation with the history of the development of the sports policy of the European Commission and an evaluation of the broad-based approach that the EU has aimed for. In addition EU policy is looked at in the context of its relationship to the internal regulation of the industry by sports federations and a wider perspective of the globalising forces that are clearly visible within professional sport is also presented.

The second part of the book focuses on the current disposition of sports governance and how this interfaces with the normative order, looking at the changes, brought about by professionalism and commercialism, which have affected the self-regulation of sports associations and the restrictions of European law on these organisations. The restrictions on the mobility of professional sports men and women within the EU following the Bosman case judgement is also evaluated alongside nationality and eligibility rules, with an assessment of whether commercial pragmatism may supercede birthrights as a replacement for existing eligibility criteria. In the final chapter of this part, the impact of sports marketing in Europe is discussed and the argument that the internet poses a real problem for effective regulation is put forward.

Football, as the major European and world sport, is the focus of the third part of the book. This part offers an evaluation of the impact of television on the sport and an analysis of transfers and contract stability in professional football in the light of the Anelka saga. The rights of establishment are also considered in the light of the increasing need for sports clubs to be financially viable.

The fourth and final part looks at the variety of national sporting regulatory frameworks which need to be reconciled within the forces of Europeanisation with case studies of sport regulation in Poland, Greece and Belgium. There is also a comparison between the European regulatory framework and that found in American sport.